JBL Names Hulk Hogan’s nWo Turn the Best Heel Turn Ever

On the latest episode of Something to Wrestle, John “Bradshaw” Layfield and Conrad Thompson ranked the best and worst heel turns in wrestling history. JBL picked Hulk Hogan joining the NWO at Bash at the Beach 1996 as the best and Steve Austin siding with Vince McMahon at WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001 as the worst, saying fans simply loved Austin too much to boo him. You can check out his comments below:

On His Picks For the Best & Worst Heel Turns:

“The greatest heel turn had to be Vince McMahon, and I’m not sure it was a heel turn. It was a heel emerging out of it. So I think it’s Vince or Hogan, either one. It’s kind of tough to choose. I’d say we’ve got to go Hogan, because that was actually a turn. Vince wasn’t necessarily a turn. And I think the worst heel turn was probably Steve, because people just loved him too much. They did not want him to be a heel. It made sense from a business decision, except when you take out the merch. The merch didn’t make sense for any of it, because Steve was selling so much merch that the company could have been funded off his merch alone. But I think Steve turning heel was probably the worst. So it’s pretty cool. You’ve got Steve in one of the best with Bret Hart, turning in a double switch, and then you’ve got Steve in one of the worst also.”

On why Austin’s Turn Didn’t Work:

“Here’s the problem with Steve, and it’s something you already mentioned. He was a heel that just happened to be a babyface. The whole world had changed. Magnum T.A. was one of the first guys that was kind of the new antihero. You had the Freebirds. Now, these were all in territories, so it wasn’t a national thing that you saw out there. But then you have Steve come along. You had Rambo, you had Clint Eastwood. These guys no longer wear the white hats; they wear the black hats. They’re the antiheroes. They’re bad guys, but they’re tough guys, and they have a certain loyalty to certain things that they believe inside, and people have a way of relating to that. That’s what society was doing at the time, and Steve captured this.

“Hogan took a territory that was good and made it better. Bruno took a territory that was good and made it better. Steve took a territory that was horrible and made it one of the hottest territories in the history of the world. I’ve never seen anything like that. Any building you put Steve’s name on, we sold out. I don’t care where it was, we sold it out. And Steve was so freaking hot, selling so much merch. It takes a while to get over. People don’t watch wrestling every single week. Some people do thankfully, but most of them will catch up with it, and they start watching when it’s hot. That’s when you bring in, as they say, the family of four. That’s when you start selling out arenas. Steve did that. So it takes a little while for things to work or things not to work. In Steve’s case, when he turned heel, after a while, people start realizing, ‘Well, there’s my guy. I want to buy the Austin 3:16 shirt. I don’t care if he’s a heel. I just kind of want to cheer him.’ But he wasn’t the guy that they wanted on television.

“Steve was so freaking hot. You say you can’t turn him heel; I’m not sure you could. And why would you? You’re selling all the merch. I understand he might not have had somebody else to wrestle. I think it might have been better to just take some time off and create some stars for Steve to wrestle with, rather than turn him heel. The main reason was the world loved this guy, and they did not want to see him in this role. To me, that’s the reason I just don’t think it worked. And why would you? My God, man, the company could be funded off the merch Steve was selling alone, and now all of a sudden you take your biggest merch seller of all time and turn him. You’d go around and see every freaking teenager and young man in the world wearing an Austin 3:16 shirt. It was the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like Beatlemania from the ’60s, I would guess, what Steve was doing, but it was global. And you turn that guy heel. I just don’t think it could have ever worked.”

On WWE Outthinking Itself:

“Yeah, and I can understand. I coached a year in junior college down in Athens, Texas at Trinity Valley Community College. And I remember one time a coach let me call plays, and I was running a counter tray. It was the old Redskins play where Grimm would kick out and Jacoby would fill in. They never stopped it. Coach comes over to me, Coach Andrews, really good man, coach of the year, great coach. And he says, ‘John, have they stopped the play?’ I said, ‘No, Coach, we’re killing them on it.’ He goes, ‘Then why aren’t you running it?’ And I realized sometimes when something works, you can outthink yourself. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Okay, this play’s working, let’s try to fake that play and do something else.’ And you outthink yourself. Sometimes when something works, you just simply stay with it. Is that boring from a creative position? Yeah, if you’re one of these guys who wants to create a bunch of stuff, but so what? It works. Steve worked, and I think what they did was they simply outthought themselves.”

On Whether the Turn Led To Austin’s 2022 Walkout:

“You might not. I think you had a problem with creative, but yeah, I agree. And the thing about it is Conrad, I was there at that WrestleMania. It was a fantastic WrestleMania to be a part of in Houston. Sometimes things get long in the tooth, and you’ve got to figure out a way to rejuvenate it. And what they did was, they went away from the core essence of what got it over, and that’s Steve being the good guy. I think that’s what hurt as much as anything. I think it’s natural. You see guys who got over like a million freaking dollars. A guy like Hogan, a guy like Tommy Rich or the Von Erichs, and there’s a natural shelf life where you start seeing a dropping off. I think that was natural. You had this zenith with Stone Cold and The Rock. That’s a dream matchup on anybody’s fantasy league. I think it’s natural for a draw to go down a little bit after that, and this is where you’ve got to find a new heel or find a new something. Instead, they turned Steve heel, and people just didn’t want it. That’s not what the wrestling world wanted. So yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe Steve doesn’t walk out if he doesn’t try that heel turn.”

On Hogan Joining the nWo:

“They were beating us. Everything they were doing was hitting on all cylinders. It was unexpected, but they were killing us. Everything they were doing was working, and all of a sudden now you’ve got Hogan there. And Hogan turns heel, which is something I don’t think anybody expected to happen. Hogan had two of the greatest runs of all time. Either run puts him in the Hall of Fame. It makes him one of the GOATs. He had the run at WrestleMania. When WrestleMania started, he’s the guy that helped WWE win the territory wars. Then he has the run in WCW. I don’t know anybody who’s had two almost completely separate runs like that. You may have had two runs basically in the same company, but to have two separate runs like that, that makes Hogan a one of one.”

On Hogan Pulling Off Being a Heel:

“Obviously, we weren’t thinking about this at the time. We were trying to stay in business, and we were trying to fight the other guys by putting out the best product we could. So I don’t think we even thought about it. But if somebody had brought it up to me, I think I would have thought that he could have done it. I don’t know if anybody would have thought he could have done it to this level. That is so unlike the Hogan that we knew, for him to be able to do stuff like this.

“And maybe — we talked about Stone Cold’s heel turn earlier. If Steve had been around for 10 years and kind of disappeared and did a couple movies here and there, and then came back and turned heel. There are different types of babyfaces. Hogan was the milquetoast babyface, which had kind of run its course. You didn’t have babyfaces like that anymore. When Kurt Angle came along, he was the milquetoast babyface, but as a heel. So I think it was a little bit of a different dynamic with Hulk than anybody else. He had been there for so long, and he had been that babyface that no longer really worked in the Attitude Era. So for Hogan to come and turn heel, it was a moment in time. Obviously, you can’t replicate Hogan, but you can’t replicate that moment in time either.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Something to Wrestle with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.